This invention relates to an electronic video processing system.
In our co-pending British Application No. 9205503.7 (Publication No. 2266037) filed on Mar. 13, 1992 and equivalent applications at the European Patent Office No. 93301889.7 (Publication No. 0560624) filed on Mar. 12, 1993, in the U.S. No. 08/030823 filed on Mar. 12, 1993, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,808,628, and in Japan No. 55786/1993 filed on Mar. 15, 1993, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference, there is described an electronic video system for displaying a plurality of video clips having storing means for storing a multiplicity of video frames, a processor connected with said storing means, user operable input means connected with the processor and serving to enable the processor to fetch from and store in the storing means data of video frames comprising any one of said video clips, a display store connected to the processor for storing video clip frames brought by the processor from or supplied by the processor to the storing means and a monitor connected with the display store for displaying frames of video data brought by the processor to the display store.
The co-pending application and its equivalents also describes the display monitor as displaying and combining video clips in a variety of ways by user operable input means, specifically a pen and tablet, for example, by splicing, creation of dissolves etc., and in each case previewing of the combined clip is afforded so that the operator need not commit himself to a particular combination until he is completely satisfied with the form of the combined clip.
Whilst the system described in our co-pending applications referred to has proved to be commercially widely acceptable, one way in which it is capable of improvement has been identified. In using the described apparatus to assemble a story by combining and editing clips from a sequence of clips, the need to change edit points in the sequence or the order of clips in the sequence occurs frequently and involves scrolling through the sequence of clips until the region of the sequence is displayed which contains the frame or frames at which the editing is to take place or at which the order of the clips is to be changed. This is a time consuming process which is addressed by the present invention.
According to one aspect of the invention there is provided an electronic video processing system comprising: a store for storing data defining a plurality of video clips each comprising one or more video frames; a user operable input device; a processor connected to the input device and the store and responsive to operation of the input device for selecting from the stored video clips a plurality of clips and for selectively combining data defining the selected clips to form data defining a video story; and a display connected to the processor for displaying images defined by data output from the processor, wherein the processor is responsive to the user operable device to output data defining for selected video clips a respective representative frame, the processor thereby causing the display to display a plurality of representative frames which together portray a portion of the video story.
According to another aspect of the invention there is provided an electronic video editing system for combining a plurality of video edits each comprising a sequence of one or more video frames selected from a plurality of video clips so that the combined video edits form a video story, in which system a plurality of representative frames respectively representing selected video edits is displayable to portray a portion of the video story.
According to a further aspect of the invention there is provided an electronic video editing system for editing a video clip comprising a sequence of video frames to form a video edit comprising plural frames selected from the sequence, in which system a frame representative of the video edit is displayable together with a pair of smaller frames derived from the first and last frames of the edit.
The above and further features of the invention are set forth with particularity in the appended claims and together with advantages thereof will become clearer from consideration of the following detailed description of an exemplary embodiment of the invention given with reference to the accompanying drawings.